Cortana

Microsoft and Amazon are partnering to enable their respective personal digital assistants to work together. In a deal announced on Aug. 30, the pair committed to getting Cortana and Alexa to communicate with each other later this year.

The consumer IT giants — such as Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft — have all invested heavily in voice technology. Analyst Gartner estimated two years that 30 percent of our interactions with technology will be through ‘conversations’ with smart machines by 2018.